The Human Person and Beauty

Another way of approach to God is via our experience of Goodness, including the sort of Goodness we call beauty.

St. Thomas notes that human beings constantly make comparisons between things. This is hotter than that. That is bigger than this, etc. Now whenever we make a comparison, we are measuring things against some ultimate or ideal or else the comparison is meaningless. To call a lit match hotter than an ice cube we are comparing the two to some Ultimate Hot such as the Sun. And so we likewise make comparisons about things being “better” or “more beautiful” or “nobler” than other things. Of course, a lot of this is subjective and we have to be very careful about making mere aesthetic tastes some sort of iron law everybody has to agree with. If you like vanilla and I like chocolate, nobody is “wrong.” But at the same time, we really do tend to broadly agree that, for instance, a gorgeous sunset over the Pacific Ocean is a better and more beautiful and noble thing than a rank and weedy former parking lot with the wind hissing over the dead and poisoned grass outside an abandoned and decaying toilet paper factory in Detroit.

Indeed, humans are distinguishable from all of natural creation in their ability to see and create beauty. In the words of G. K. Chesterton, "Art is the signature of man." We do not find rough studies of how a wildebeest swings its head sketched in the dirt by the chimpanzees of Africa. Those creatures biologically nearest us in the great dynasties of the animal kingdom—the primates—are still so remotely different from us that there exists an unbridgeable chasm between the rest of creation and our capacity to appreciate and create beauty. Such creativity and love of beauty does not square well with the attempt to claim that there is no real difference between humans and other creatures. It does, however, make a remarkable amount of sense in light of the biblical account of humans as somehow being made in the image of God who creates. We really do see that a Mozart Sonata is beautiful and nails on a chalkboard or the noise of five pianos dropped from an airplane are not. We perceive that one is better than the other, and therefore measure them both against some ultimate Good which is, again, what everybody means by “God.” As St. Augustine said long ago:

Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky. . . question all these realities. All respond: "See, we are beautiful." Their beauty is a profession [confessio]. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One [Pulcher] who is not subject to change?

So we find it is so that not only do beings find their source in Being, beauties find their source in Beauty. We find that God is the ultimate Beauty, which is another way of saying that he not only exists, but is Good. And so, looking not merely at creation-in-general, but at the strange creature called homo sapiens, we can begin to glimpse, not only that God is, but that, since Man and Woman reflect him as all creatures reflect him, he is more like an artist than mere Mind.

Comments

Raymond—I don’t know who “Proctologist” is, but good and evil are subjective, never absolute. Most of us agree that burning people alive is evil, but Pope Innocent IV Ad exstirpanda (“For the elimination”)authorized the use of torture for eliciting confessions from heretics during the Inquisition and executing relapsed heretics by burning them alive.
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People do evil acts all the time, usually because their religion has defined it as “good.”

Posted by Mark Shea on Monday, Nov 25, 2013 3:15 PM (EDT):

It is remarkable what prodigies of faith atheists are capable of when they need to defend their creed. If, by “art”, you mean that these animals can be trained to dextrously manipulate their environment for a treat, then yes: chimps and elephants have “art”. If you mean the spontaneous creation of original works of what we call art, then I salute your prodigious faith, which is greater than mine. See this link: http://scienceblogs.com/bioephemera/2008/03/06/can-animals-create-art/ And check out that “bird’ picture from the chimp in his abstract period.

Posted by Kenneth on Monday, Nov 25, 2013 3:01 PM (EDT):

We now know that chimps and elephants both have art, Mark. Chesterton was ignorant of that.

Posted by Raymond on Sunday, Nov 24, 2013 9:59 PM (EDT):

Well…er…Proctologist…I appreciate your taking up for me, but I don’t agree that Good and Evil are totally subjective and relative. And in my previous comment I tried to stay away from the word Evil as much as possible. I think that, as a broad general rule, actions that do not cause pain or harm to others are, at least, morally neutral. Actions that actively create benefit for others, particularly when they do not also directly benefit the actor, can be considered Good. Actions that directly cause harm to others can be considered morally wrong, but it takes a special kind of Agent to truly be considered Evil. I believe this broad construct applies more or less across cultures.

And to answer Billy Bean’s question. I was a Catholic for fifty years, and went to Catholic grade school, high school and college. But after years of struggling with moral concerns and skepticism over supernatural occurrences, I finally came to the realization that there is not sufficient evidence for supernatural events of any sort, and plenty of evidence against it. So no Sky Wizard, no wings and halos, and, pleasantly, no devils or demons. I found peace and completion when I gave up religion.

Posted by Raymond on Sunday, Nov 24, 2013 7:27 PM (EDT):

“you must know that the God espoused by traditional theism did not create evil…”

I challenge that contention. I don’t agree with it, and I contend that you don’t either. Your understanding of the mythical God is that he created all things - the laws of nature, all of space and time, and human beings with the capacity for good or evil action. He created the human body with flaws and weaknesses that lead to great suffering. He created the world with properties and conditions that result in calamities, suffering and death. There are those who claim that God CAUSES such suffering and death because of his hatred for specific groups of people and a growing acceptance of those people. And God created human beings with great capacity for love and charity AND with great capacity for hatred and avarice. As hard as some PEOPLE (not God) work to bring peace, justice and hope to the world, there are other people, in greater numbers, who act with hatred and violence, to other people and to the environment.

It is more comforting and more believable that there is no God that underlies the world as it exists, than to pretend that there is some sort of invisible, intangible “Good” that has the power to intervene and chooses not to.

Posted by Billy Bean on Sunday, Nov 24, 2013 5:38 PM (EDT):

@Raymond: Glad to read a frank acknowledgement that atheism is a creed, a definite “position,” if you like, holding to particular tenets of faith (propositions that can be confirmed or rejected on the basis of reason and evidence, but never demonstrably proven or disproven, as your post above indicates) and rejecting others. Atheists believe that the God of traditional religious and philosophical theism doesn’t exist, and that such a “being” would be “evil.” Glad also to see also that you acknowledge a standard of good and evil with which you expect all rational persons to agree. As a Catholic Christian, I know why I hold to my faith that God exists and why I acknowledge a moral standard as binding and universal. I’m just curious as to your own position. Are you Catholic? Perhaps Evangelical or Orthodox? A Jew? Muslim, perhaps? If so, you must know that the God espoused by traditional theism did not create evil. If not, how do you come by your absolute belief in unbelief, your assured knowledge of what constitutes “good” and “evil”? The results of an opinion poll? A mathematical projection?

Posted by Raymond on Sunday, Nov 24, 2013 1:22 PM (EDT):

Actually, the atheist position is “God doesn’t exist. But if the God you describe and worship existed, he would be evil, even if you don’t want to recognize it.” You describe a god who is omnipotent and omnipresent, but created horrible diseases, catastrophic climate conditions, terrible poverty and starvation, and people who have the ability to correct or improve those conditions but don’t want to. The world behaves in the same way it would if God didn’t exist, and pretending that he does makes no sense.

Posted by Craig Roberts on Saturday, Nov 23, 2013 3:53 PM (EDT):

Wow Mark. That was like a whole essay on atheism in five sentences.

I’ve often thought that our capacity for appreciation is limited by what we can understand, while our ability to criticize and find fault is limitless because it can be driven by irrational fear. Atheists use this to find fault with ‘everything’, literally our universe, our being, our very existence in God.

Posted by Mark P. Shea on Saturday, Nov 23, 2013 3:14 PM (EDT):

People like Raven, bent on hatred of God, and therefore of life, always look at the surface in order to say, “God is evil and doesn’t exist too!” People like Pope Francis look beneath the surface and love the disfigured. Atheism is, at bottom, a sort of metaphysical cowardice. It searches beauty to seek out ugliness. Because it brings ugliness with it wherever it goes.

Posted by Norman on Saturday, Nov 23, 2013 2:53 PM (EDT):

@John,
To measure anything you need some sort of maximum and some sort of minimum. They don’t necessarily have to be ultimate as is the case of boiling and frozen water, it can be hotter and colder but once you go ‘ultimate’ in terms of measuring such as a thing of beauty; we may not have seen “beauty”, but we have seen “beautiful” and know that there is some sort of maximum and minimum even if we haven’t specifically seen or can’t measure the maximums of each end. The match and ice cube should make sense only in that it’s a measurement, the separate fact is that there is an ultimate maximum in that we know there are items hotter than a match as well, and things colder than a frozen water ice cube.

Posted by Raven on Saturday, Nov 23, 2013 2:48 PM (EDT):

Humans aren’t the only artists/creators of beauty in the animal kingdom”
http://www.elephantartgallery.com/
/
http://www.koko.org/world/art_abstracts.html

I don’t see how that makes sense at all. When we say that a lit match is hotter than an ice cube, we are comparing a match and an ice cube. If we want to take the Sun into account, we can say “a lit match is hotter than an ice cube, and the Sun is hotter than a lit match.” But an “Ultimate Hot” is NOT intrinsic to a simple comparison.

In this case “Ultimate Hot” is the basis for the comparison. By saying “which one is hotter?”, you’re asking “which one is more like the Ultimate Hot?”

You can’t just compare two things in a vacuum, there needs to be a standard of comparison. For a more concrete example, imagine some weirdo handed you a stapler and ream of blank printer paper and asked “which is more beautiful?” Outside of rejecting the question entirely as pointless, how would you respond?

I would begin to answer by constructing an argument for what beauty is and why one of those things conforms to the standard more closely than the other. I’m not sure how else you could coherently address the question.

Posted by Ronald King on Saturday, Nov 23, 2013 9:45 AM (EDT):

I would say that beauty begins with the instinctive response of pleasure to the object observed and then consciously constructed as a belief supporting the instinctive response.

Posted by Sam Schmitt on Saturday, Nov 23, 2013 12:06 AM (EDT):

“Beauty is in the unique mind of each beholder”
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How do you know this?

Posted by Joy Park on Friday, Nov 22, 2013 7:19 PM (EDT):

Mark, can you write God and Beauty? it would be sooo exciting topic!

Posted by Matthew Kennel on Friday, Nov 22, 2013 5:30 PM (EDT):

Mark, you say, “Now whenever we make a comparison, we are measuring things against some ultimate or ideal or else the comparison is meaningless.” But, I would say that that is exactly what we’re NOT doing every time we make a comparison (lest we leave ourselves open to Dawkins’ “smelliness” objection). As Edward Feser notes in his book, Aquinas, “Aquinas is not in fact trying to argue in the Fourth Way that everything that we observe to exist in degrees (including heat, smelliness, sweetness, etc.) must be traceable to some single maximum standard of perfection. Here (as elsewhere in the Five Ways) his archaic scientific examples have led modern readers to misread him. Given the (false, we now know) medieval theory that fire is the source of all heat, he naturally appeals to fire and heat merely to illustrate the general principle that things that come in degrees point to a maximum…. [Aquinas] intends to use the principle in question to explain truth, goodness, nobility, being and the like specifically…as commentators on the Fourth Way generally recognize, Aquinas is mainly concerned in this argument to show that to the extent that these transcendental features of the world come in degrees, they must be traceable to a maximum.”

Posted by Robert A.Rowland on Friday, Nov 22, 2013 3:17 PM (EDT):

Beauty is in the unique mind of each beholder, but we must have been given an innate ability from God to recognize it.

Posted by Raymond on Friday, Nov 22, 2013 2:01 PM (EDT):

“Now whenever we make a comparison, we are measuring things against some ultimate or ideal or else the comparison is meaningless. To call a lit match hotter than an ice cube we are comparing the two to some Ultimate Hot such as the Sun.”

I don’t see how that makes sense at all. When we say that a lit match is hotter than an ice cube, we are comparing a match and an ice cube. If we want to take the Sun into account, we can say “a lit match is hotter than an ice cube, and the Sun is hotter than a lit match.” But an “Ultimate Hot” is NOT intrinsic to a simple comparison. (Unless you are talking Angelia Jolie - Ultimate Hot, but I digress…)

“Indeed, humans are distinguishable from all of natural creation in their ability to see and create beauty.”

You don’t consider bird calls beautiful? You don’t consider a sunset beautiful? You don’t consider a Corgi puppy sleeping on its back and snoring beautiful? I think you are confusing Beauty with Art. There are an infinite number of beautiful things that are not created by a human. But it takes a person to create something beautiful as an expression of something else - or something that is NOT beautiful as an expression of something else.

Posted by sarah mac on Friday, Nov 22, 2013 10:28 AM (EDT):

I liked this. Except for the shot at Detroit. That hurt.

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About Mark Shea

Mark P. Shea is a popular Catholic writer and speaker. The author of numerous books, his most recent work is The Work of Mercy (Servant) and The Heart of Catholic Prayer (Our Sunday Visitor). Mark contributes numerous articles to many magazines, including his popular column “Connecting the Dots” for the National Catholic Register. Mark is known nationally for his one minute “Words of Encouragement” on Catholic radio. He also maintains the Catholic and Enjoying It blog. He lives in Washington state with his wife, Janet, and their four sons.